La Jornada Editorial: Mexico - The Vote, Trashed

Mexico: The Vote, Trashed

The ballot boxes full of votes
found yesterday by a citizen in the rubbish dump of Bordo de
Xochiaca, the piecemeal disappearance of opposition votes in
the Preliminary Election Results Program (PREP), the
unlikely trends registered in the updating of that
instrument during Sunday night through Monday morning, as
well as the sudden appearance of two and a half million
votes placed by the Federal Elctoral Institute (IFE) in an
"anomalies file", whose make-up clearly favours Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador, in contradiction to what has so far
been announced by the electoral body, among other elements
bring to mind a key date for Mexican society in its long
struggle for democracy: June 6th 1988, that State-fixed
election in which the public power de-legitimised the
popular vote to impose Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the
presidency with his anti-national, anti-people
program.

For many months before that vote, the federal
government dedicated itself to slandering and reviling the
candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and to backing with
public resources, obscenely, massively, the candidate
anointed by Miguel de la Madrid. The day of the election,
the citizenry faced a catalogue of foul practices that still
were not enough to fake a credible victory for Salinas and
so the official in charge of the vote crashed the system to
allow time for data manipulation. In the days that followed,
people were to find alongside highways and on waste land the
remains of voting ballots and other electoral paperwork,
carrying expressions of the popular will that were never
counted. The votes that were preserved were never checked.
The regime refused and some years later, with the approval
of the National Action Party deputies, coordinated in those
days by Diego Ferenandez de Cevallos, the Salinocracy
destroyed the boxes containing the votes.

Whoever bets on
society failing to remember is mistaken. The episodes
referred to are present in the collective memory and become
vivid at the sight of the enormous shabbiness of public
officials' behaviour in the months prior to last Sunday's
presidential election and at the obvious incompetence or
lack of will of the IFE to guarantee an equitable electoral
process, transparent and in accordance with the law. The
worst fears of manipulation of the elections are confirmed
with each hour that has passed following the end of voting,
with every public blather of the electoral officials, with
every television broadcast that bears the unmistakable trace
of the official line, with every discrepancy in the data and
every inconsistency in the behaviour of those charged with
handling the vote. One has to compare the seals of normality
and transparency granted by the Aznarist election observer
sent by the European Union with the reality of the ballot
boxes scattered in a rubbish tip, with the evidence of
opposition votes disappered by the PREP and with the signs
of electronic manipulation - Hildebrand's algorithm, as it
has been popularly dubbed - in the figures of the IFE.

The
script is easy to predict: in the next few hours Luis Carlos
Ugalde (1) will go out and say what happened at Bordo de
Xochiaca is "an isolated case", that the piecemeal theft of
opposition votes does not alter the general trend and that
the PREP is impeccable. What is so offensive and depressing
is that this person and other functionaries of the governing
clique are trying to stretch the credulity of citizens of
all political persuasions to the point of making them
swallow these millstones. The serious thing is that in a few
hours the district counts will begin under circumstances in
which the IFE finds itself bereft of prestige, moral
authority and credibility. The vices of the actual election
can now be added to the pre-election shabbiness and a now
obvious unscrupulous manipulation of the expression of the
popular will; it is now clear the irregularities serve to
complete government and media partiality; the "technical
draw" between Lopez Obrador and Felipe Calderon is revealed
as a scenario constructed from the seats of political,
economic and electoral power to facilitate a "triumph" for
the latter that is steadily becoming more doubtful and
suspicious.

The district recounts are the last chance to
correct the self-evident alterations suffered by the mass of
votes and the possibility looms, as a consequence, that the
IFE may not be able to hand over even minimally credible
results and that the election ought to be settled in the
Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power (TEPJF).
Those are the established legal channels and all the players
should stick to them. Last Sunday, the citizenry gave a
lesson in democratic culture and civility; the arbiters of
the contest, on the other hand dirtied and clouded the
voting process in what constitutes an exasperating insult
for the country and its historic memory. The first of the
alternating presidencies, the government of "change" is
ending in this way with a blatant intervention in the polls.
For their part, the current officials of the IFE, a body
brought into being with the effort and sacrifice of
innumerable Mexican democrats, have dragged it back to 1988:
today as 18 years ago, an indeterminate part of the people's
verdict has ended up in trash dumps, either real ones or
cyber ones, and such a regression is flatly
unacceptable.

Note1. Luis Carlos
Ugalde is head of the
IFE.

*************

Translated from Spanish into English by toni
solo, a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for
linguistic diversity (*transtlaxcala@yahoo.com*). This
translation is
Copyleft.

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